Queen
by za
Summary: A bittersweet look at a possible relationship between Nini and Satine, from the vantage of twenty years later.


Title: Queen Bitch

Author: mao

Disclaimer: The idea of Moulin Rouge! belongs to the incredible Baz Luhrmann and his staff. I am eternally indebted to him. The clip of lyrics at the beginning comes from the song "Come Home" by the divine Placebo. The title of the piece comes from the David Bowie song of the same name. Grazi.

Author's Notes: I started writing this after my ex cheated on me, then dumped me. And then it took a life of it's own. Enjoy.

Warnings: A bit crude in places. Femmeslash of the Nini/Satine variety (yum!).

***

**vanish like a lipstick trace**

**it always blows me away**

**every cloud is grey**

**dreams of yesterday**

In another time, or another place perhaps, we would have been different. 

Domesticated, perhaps, me in the kitchen cooking whatever she brought home from the meat or - if it were friday - fish markets earlier that day. Raising small children conceived in breathless moments in back alleys, paid for in pounds or dollars. She would go out to work as a seamstress, a printer, a vendor, and make the money, and I would stay home with the grubby faces and dirty feet of our children to do the housework. At night the whoring would happen quiety, each of us taking one or two nights a week to supplement her income, turning a couple tricks a night then coming home to bathe away the night's work and fall, exhausted, to the mattress with the other. I would massage the knots gently from her neck, tossing that famously red hair over her shoulder, and working the muscles until she moaned with relaxation. We would make love quietly, our orgasms communicated in sheets clenched between sweaty fingers and soft panting between kisses from dry lips.

Perhaps we could have been pioneers, cutting our way through the Amazon or the Congo or the Swamps of Louisiana with huge knives, wearing neat khaki-colored safari outfits. Tough and rugged, we would sleep out under the stars, skinning animals and eating rare delicacies like snake or wild boar. The whoring would be an unspoken secret, conducted quietly with natives, in bushes or behind trees, skirts hiked up and paid for in new equipment or delicious food. And then afterwards, the great gaping sky above us, the lights of the stars twinkling down merrily, approving of the silence of our pact as we wrapped around each other like snakes in the darkness, my head resting in the narrow space between her alabaster shoulder and her neck. 

Perhaps we would have met as girls, in a convent, and she would have slipped me poetry written on stolen vellum, cute limmericks about puppies or pigs, delicate haikus with the meanings obscured by her lacy words, ballads about two women - gasp! - dying of love for one another, after consummating it behind the chapel one day. Had we been rich, the whoring would have happened more subtley, with our mothers coaching us to ensnare a man with words, then, weeping, throw ourselves at him as a weapon designed by his passion, making him give us everything before a brief copulation and an icy goodbye. It would have been almost as quiet as our nights together, on one or the other's bed, in deliciously forbidden ecstasy, listening for the angry footsteps of our mothers or the sudden gasp of a maid stumbling upon us.

I've thought through all of the ways it could have been different, or could have been better, but the thing I've discovered in every scenario is that in the end, we always whore ourselves out, in an unspoken pact to make money and, ultimately, destroy everything we'd built. 

We always would have been whores, whether for money, or power, or "services rendered," as she used to say when she'd slip quietly back in our room (back in the beginning, before she was the most famous whore in Paris) after a night with Harold, gasping from the weight of his gut on her fragile frame. 

I never asked her what that meant, but as she became more popular and more famous, it became clear what exactly his services were, as well as the price. No matter how much I love(d) her, it's still clear to me that she had no more talent than the rest of us - and less than some. Tarot, after all, could kick her legs up the highest, and Araby could manage steps no one else could, and Tattoo could turn more tricks a night then Mome Fromage and Babydoll combined. 

Once I went to Zidler, and asked what the price was, for one night of star treatment. In response, he told me to pray. I knelt, to do so, and he undid the laces of his pants, indicating what he meant. I was revulsed - me, of all people, I know, but the thought of it made me want to vomit. 

"Then you don't deserve it," he told me and laughed jovially, as if he'd made a brilliant joke. I imagined her, her hair held back by a pale ivory ribbon, so desparate and feeling so alone that she felt she had to do that for a little peace. I ran from the room, ran down the narrow, twisty halls that took on all the stone and grey of a dungeon to me in that moment, straight to our tiny room, where I found her seated by the window, staring out into the alley below. 

The brick was not so red as her hair, the sky nowhere near the clear shade of her eyes. Her skin glowed in the dankness of our room, and she was too ethereal for me to touch her for one agonizing moment. She took me in with her eyes, warm like puddles, and though she didn't remark on my bedraggled hair, my heaving chest, my eyes wide with fear, her own eyes widened a fraction, telling me that she saw it all, that she could feel my panic across the narrow room. 

And then I ran to her, collapsed with my head on her lap, my knees, as if in prayer, on the floor and my skirts splayed like so much discarded paint, the yellows and reds of them cast across the floor. She patted my head delicately, moving single strands of hair gently with her fingers, calming me with her hands. When my breathing was regular, she looked up and out, back into the alley, not meeting my eyes again.

"You'll do it someday. There are worse things," she told me, her voice as soft as a swallow singing out for the first time. She turned back, meeting my eyes, and the determination I saw in her face scared me more than anything else.

I knew then, for the first time, that whoring was what would tear us apart. The men were nothing to us as people - she used to make fun of them, comparing them to pigs chasing after slops in a bucket, prepared to do anything to get even the tiniest nibble. 

One night, after turning tricks for a couple hours with my ruffled skirt up around my waist, I stopped on the way back to buy a bouquet of posies with my three extra pennies. They would brighten up our room and maybe bring that rare delight to her face, that moment when she glowed with joy and she would hug my head to her breast, rumpling my lacquered hair. 

"Pig," she said as she slapped me, to remind me of the men that chased us, of the one who'd become nearly obsessed with me when I'd taken his virginity the year before. Her eyes hard like diamonds, she crushed them beneath the heel of her kid leather boot. Already she was on her way up, the gold-laced and jewel-encrusted elephant under construction.

"Please don't go to him anymore," I pleaded to her, and she promised, but that night as I lay in post-orgasmic comfort beneath our - new - scarlet velvet duvet, I felt her warmth slip away from the side of my body. I watched through the veil of my eyelashes as she slipped on a new dressing gown - all silver and gold, the threads glinting in the flickering light of our winter fire - and quietly left the room. 

I pretended not to notice for months as she turned tricks, then made love to me once we'd bathed, and, when she thought I was asleep, slipped away to Zidler's room, her ambition taking precedence to my love. I kept my mouth shut when her stomach grew so that it strained against the constraints of her costumes, then was suddenly flat after a mysterious, vaguely excused disappearance of two days. 

I kept myself consoled with dreams of when we would escape this horrible place, and the Moulin Rouge would become just a happy memory, glittering in the past, diamonds and lace forgotten because we had each other. I kept my mouth shut as she rose to fame, every night more spectacular in her feats of dancing and singing, sparkling a new gown, that beautiful hair slipping ever further from my grasp. 

After she moved into the Elephant, she still came to my room every night for a quick copulation, and every day it became less filled with passion and more a perfunctory duty we performed before bed. I'd make her come, she'd make me come, and as I lay back on my pillows after she'd gone, I'd look at the slight smears of her lipstick on my sheets, the red more faint than the blood of Jesus on the cross my mother left me, nowhere near the red of her hair. 

Gradually she came to my room only every other night, then every two or three, and eventually she came whenever she wished, knocking on the door as everyone else did, then quickly opening it and ducking inside, dropping her clothes on the floor and leaping into my bed. She'd touch me and I'd touch her and then it would be over, she'd be gone in the same whirlwind that brought her, without ever a word spoken. 

I never figured out why she kept coming back to my room, except that maybe it had to do with security, with keeping a sense of stability. She never left me officially, nor did I leave her after she took up with the writer. And there was no joy in those meetings, because the music had gone from her voice, the gleam from her brilliant hair. It was all reflected in the hardness of her eyes, glittering like valuable jewels, but with no real life to them. Where I found a little pleasure in my eked out existence - drunken nights with Araby and China Doll, or Mome Fromage and I downing a bottle of absinthe and watching the walls, or even just the simple joy of dancing - she existed solely to reach the next level, never satisfied with her current level of success. She was obsessed with being more, with having more, with going up.

And she was going up. Gone was the naive girl who climbed into my bed one night whispering, "Shush, Nini, I'm cold," and reassured me with kisses so gentle I thought I would ache with wanting to hold her. She'd gotten so good at pretending, so good at lying, at being Satine all the time that whoever she'd once been was lost forever. She spent so much time convincing everyone else that she could do everything that it all began to fall apart.

She got lost in the lie, in being Satine. She wasted all her energy trying to go up, and in the very end it sent her rocketing down, violently and with the same velocity as a bird that dies mid-flight. Her hair lost its lustre, her teeth seemed brittle inside her once-luscious lips, her skin no longer glowed, but seemed to radiate her weakness.

Of course, at the end there she had never been more popular. No one noticed the slight lines around her eyes and mouth forming, indications of the tightness inside her, of the way she was wearing herself out with the lie that was Satine. 

Sometimes I sit on my bed, smoking a thin cigarette bought with my hard-fought money, and I look at the lipstick traces still burned into the sheets, left there years ago by a girl who'd been born on the streets with a name that would become lost to the annals of time to a monster with limp red hair and eyes like diamonds. I sit and look at the scarlet marks and think of the first time she touched me, of the blood that came from between my legs and the way she cried for having hurt me. 

"It's all right," I murmered to her, soothing her fears with kisses and gentle caresses. She's gone now, like the blood, but the lipstick, cheap rouge on cheap linen, endures even now when I dance in a dress that ends just below my knees and my hair is short and lacquered to my head, instead of in the high chignon I used to wear. 

I smoke my cheap cigarettes and think of the things that could have been different, and know that in the end, her eyes still would have been diamonds and her hair still would have faded to its cheap copper. The only thing I feel sad about now is that the men - the pigs - never got to see her at her finest, in those firelit nights between two scratchy sheets, her skin glowing like new porcelain and the curls of her hair over her back. 


End file.
